Skin-deep success

The president keeps the peace but fails to reduce graft

THE security guards barely shrugged when a small white man with tinted glasses, his African-American female companion and a bevy of Washingtonian movers and shakers swept through the faux-marble lobby of the Royal Grand Hotel in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital. High-flying friends often drop in to see Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the country’s Nobel-prizewinning president. This time, on August 26th, it was Bono, an Irish singer turned philanthropist, and Condoleezza Rice, America’s former secretary of state, along with no fewer than seven American senators, who came to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the end of a civil war that once made Liberia a byword for barbarity.

“I’m starting to understand the success that’s unfolding here,” said Bono. Perhaps he had not heard that none of the country’s 25,000 university applicants passed this year’s entrance exams after administrators switched to a fair admissions system based on real marks rather than bribes and family connections. Education in Liberia is a mess. Alas, despite the president’s best efforts, so is much else.

At crossroads throughout the capital, police in dark-blue uniforms still habitually ask drivers for dollar bills. “The police force is riddled with corruption,” in the words of a new report by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. Three out of four Liberians say they paid a bribe to an official in the past year, according to another report. High-level graft scandals are common. Few people are prosecuted. “We have a country that has a very low capacity,” says Mrs Sirleaf. She defends her decision to appoint three well-educated sons to key posts by lauding their qualifications.

Reporting government scandals is tricky. Rodney Sieh, editor of Front Page Africa, an independent newspaper, was imprisoned last month, unable to pay $1.5m in libel damages awarded to a government minister who had been sacked for graft. According to Mr Sieh, no media outlet has won a libel case since the civil war.

To Mrs Sirleaf’s credit, she has kept Liberia at peace, thus giving the economy a chance to grow. She speaks up for human rights and is wooing foreign investment. The scars of the past are healing. Liberians are returning from abroad to repair war-damaged houses. “Any objective analysis of where Liberia was a decade ago politically and economically with where it is now would have to conclude that a major transformation is under way,” says Steven Radelet, a former presidential adviser.

Yet the formal economy still relies heavily on the export of unprocessed rubber, palm oil, timber and iron ore by foreign companies with concessions for half the country’s land. Too few lucky Liberians are becoming very rich. The poor still bemoan lousy government services. Resentment and anger are rising.